Rubbish Inventions of the Modern World: Digital Picture Frames

Believe it or not, Christmas is not a million miles away. Now is the time that retailers and manufacturers everywhere start to churn out the inevitable stream of crap to get you to part with your hard earned.



Over the next few weeks, a View from the Bar guides you through the pitfalls of Christmas shopping. Today: Digital Picture Frames.

Photographers and photo-developers are constantly bemoaning the death of the photograph. In the past, you'd take your holiday snaps, sent them off the be developed and then a week later, you'd all gather around like a family going "awwwwww" and "oooooh" as your mum flicked through the photos. (As a kid, you were never allowed to touch them). Then they'd be filed away in a photo album for another day - even the rubbish ones where your finger strayed across the lens or where you took photos of the TV just to use the film up.

Today, we don't bother with that. These days it's all instantaneous. We take the photos, immediately delete the ones we don't want and then download them onto our hard-drive the minute we land. And we just leave them there. Half the time we don't even look at the, they just sit on the hard-drive never to be seen again. We ignore the fact that we spend £200-£300 on a digital camera that gives us worse picture quality that our old 35mm camera, we just like the sound of the word "megapixels".

So along came a series of ideas designed to kick-start the home photography scene. First you had photo printers, but people still couldn't be bothered printing photos after they bought a new printer and so the next big idea was digital photo development booths. Think of it like a cash machine except instead of putting in your debit card, (then you put in your debit card to pay) you put in a memory card and instead of cash, you get photographs instead. They are still knocking about here and there.

But then some boffin decided that instead of merely printing our photos, we needed somewhere to display them and so the 'digital photo frame' was born - and it was rubbish.

The idea is to display your digital photos in the same way you'd display your old-style photos. The problem is though, it's entirely dependent on screen quality, which isn't very good.
Manufacturers of these things, like any modern consumer electronics, look to keep the costs of the product as low as possible, ignoring any detrimental effects in quality. That means when some no-mark distributor of poor quality LCD screens comes up with a good offer, it's just too tempting.
Not just that though, the big £2000 three screen jobbie you see on the above link? One of the screens didn't work and the remote was comical. You physically had to go up to the device and form a tunnel with your hand between the remote and the screen you wanted to change so that the remote didn't affect the wrong screen!

In the end, the reviewer for Channel 5's "The Gadget Show" ended up making his own picture frame - with a 15in TFT monitor and some MDF from Homebase.

So in short, avoid digital photo frames. The first of a series of 'What not to buy this Christmas' advice.